From Tolerance to Equality: How Elites Brought America to Same-Sex Marriage

By Darel E. Paul

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said that to point out the social conditions and material interests underlying cultural values and modes is to “transgress… one of the fundamental taboos of the intellectual world.”1 To make such a transgression one is likely to be condemned as sacrilegious in the “attempt to treat culture, that present incarnation of the sacred, as an object of science.”2

Diversity is the sovereign social and political ideal of our age. It is the public ideology of the country’s most powerful institutions. As Ellen Berrey said, “the word wears a halo.”3 Within this dominion the gay-rights rainbow is to be conceived of as perfectly representative of the diversity of mankind’s nations, races, languages and sects. Indeed, it was first popularised politically by American Methodist minister J. W. van Kirk following the First World War when he incorporated it into his flag for a future world federation.4 How fitting that the rainbow flag is found fluttering above the public squares of our polis now, as the dawn of a Brave New World stirs.

Your reviewer approached the recent sociological study From Tolerance to Equality by Darel E. Paul with the hope that it would afford authoritative scientific evidence for the economic incentive behind the corporate and oligarchic promotion of "gay rights" in our times. The regnant ideology of our age ensures Paul’s examination of the kulturkampf must be approached obliquely, and from an ostensibly neutral position. As an empirical study the book is data heavy and replete with sociological jargon. A superfluity of pages on sociological constructions like "multiple correspondence analysis" nevertheless convincingly attest to the correlation between wealth, "social and cultural capital" and support for "gay marriage." Sadly, there is less material addressing the relation between the promotion of homosexuality and the suppression of wages, but the careful reader can draw genuinely insightful conclusions from the exhaustive evidence Paul examines.

Paul argues that American elites use opinion on homosexuality as a mark of social distinction and thus as a tool for accumulating cultural authority and political power. To infer they also expand their economic power can also be evidenced in the book. Notre Dame Professor Patrick Deneen writes how Paul’s study "raises unavoidable and even uncomfortable connections between the entrenchment of class inequality and elite-drive advances of sexual equality in today’s America." Deneen writes:

[Powerful adherents of the New Age are] committed to displacing traditional arrangements of family, marriage, and child-rearing in favor of individual autonomy, self-creation, and lifestyle choice shorn of long-standing commitment. World-straddling corporations have a strong interest in fostering atomized, de-normed subjects. Because their “identities” arise primarily from appetites that can be altered through both marketing and technology, they are the ideal consumers. The ideological justification for this economic project has been long-prepared by the intellectual class, which over the last four decades has devoted itself to the project of displacing traditional norms in favor of theories of self-creation in a world governed not by tradition or natural law, but solely in accordance with the human will.5

This magazine is interested in connections. Connections that no other publication sees or allows to be seen. Paul comes close to exposing the ever more clear connection between economic subjugation and sexual liberation but ultimately draws back from openly accusing the American oligarchy. To remain neutral, as Paul does, and yet send coded signals about the damage wrought to the common good by sexual liberation is a skill that one must begrudgingly acknowledge. For example, Paul writes that gay marriage is strongly an attack on fatherhood:

The most common gay family is a lesbian couple. Thanks to same-sex marriage and the state’s presumption of paternity being extended to the wives of lesbian birth mothers, today the children of such couples lack not only social fathers but even biological fathers. Adoption, single motherhood, and sperm donors all predate same-sex marriage… Yet each of these in its own way disguised, replaced or anonymized the father. None presumed his nonexistence… Now that two women are listed on a birth certificate as a child’s two parents, the complete separation of biological from both legal and social fatherhood is not only possible but necessary.6

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This is just an excerpt from Culture Wars Magazine, not the full article. To continue reading, purchase the December, 2018 edition of Culture Wars Magazine.